"A man who looks like a normal stick-figure xkcd character, but for the addition of a black hat. The man's hat is a reference to Aram from the now-defunct webcomic Men in Hats, not to black hat hackers as is often supposed.[27][28] This character first appeared in the comic Poisson (the twelfth comic published on the website).[29] The character refers to himself as a "Classhole" (a portmanteau of "classy" and "asshole")"

Luckily, neither "malapropism" nor "neologism" make an appearance.Perhaps someone should edit the XKCD page to include a reference to the Malamanteau debacle?

I love that someone made reference to "real world consequences", as if Wikipedia is the real world...

Okay, it's not nice to poke ants with a stick, but it's funny.

The "take home" humour in this is that yes, Wikipedia has favourites: there are longer articles about some films (Avatar) and TV programmes (The Simpsons) than there are about some African (Namibia) and Middle-eastern (Tajikistan) countries. (Examples were off the top of my head. I'm sure I could find better ones if I spent more than 23 seconds.)

Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia and encyclopedias are intended to educate people. The problem is that wikipedia sometimes gets massively over-technical or over-precise to the point that the average person has little hope of comprehending because too many 25 cent words are used (education fail).

A related failing with Wikipedia is that it wants to also be where people go learn how to pronounce words, but for Pete's sake are people really expected to understand stuff like /ˌsuːpərˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪˈdoʊʃəs/? I'm sure that there are valid reasons for using jibberish but the average person is just left scratching their head. Most smart people just go to a real dictionary site since they will get their answer faster rather than expending effort learning Wiki-jibberish. Most programmers look at this jibberish and figure that they've accidently read data past the end of the string.

Last edited by Lathe on Wed May 12, 2010 3:10 pm UTC, edited 1 time in total.

Wikipedia does fail a bit, but that's where Simple Wikipedia goes to the rescue. Obviously a super special advanced topic like Deconstruction will be incomprehensible. Wikipedia doesn't regard your knowledge curve, more like writing the facts.

cream wobbly wrote:I love that someone made reference to "real world consequences", as if Wikipedia is the real world...

Wikipedia is in the real world. (So's this forum.)

cream wobbly wrote:... there are longer articles about [some recent works of fiction] than there are about some ... countries

Unfortunately, the "anyone can edit" volunteer-driven aspect of Wikipedia means that pop culture tends to get more attention than many subjects which are usually seen as more serious and more deserving. This is something the Wikipedia community struggles with. The reaction to the "Malamanteau" page creation is something akin to an immune system response to this. And as with a real immune system, repeated exposure has perhaps made Wikipedia overly sensitive to this.-----

Lathe wrote:... wikipedia sometimes gets massively over-technical or over-precise to the point that the average person has little hope of comprehending ...

This is indeed a challenge. There have been attempts to start a "simple language" variant, but it ran into problems with assumptions. Everyone's vocabulary and level of expertise varies. How do you define what the appropriate level of sophistication is? That said, there are a lot of articles which are truly more technical or precise than they need to be. This being Wikipedia, there are, of course, tags for that: {{technical}} and {{over explained}}.

Lathe wrote:A related failing with Wikipedia is that it wants to also be where people go learn how to pronounce words, but for Pete's sake are people really expected to understand stuff like /ˌsuːpərˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪˈdoʊʃəs/?

FWIW, that's the International Phonetic Alphabet. The reason it's used is that Wikipedia is supposed to be global and as language neutral as possible. The pronunciation conventions used in dictionaries vary widely. Worst of all, pronunciation itself varies widely. "Correct pronunciation" will be very different for American vs British speakers. The IPA is seen as a lesser evil, which makes everyone equally unhappy. Nobody's been able to come up with a better idea. Do you have one?

Lathe wrote:A related failing with Wikipedia is that it wants to also be where people go learn how to pronounce words, but for Pete's sake are people really expected to understand stuff like /ˌsuːpərˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪˈdoʊʃəs/? I'm sure that there are valid reasons for using jibberish but the average person is just left scratching their head. Most smart people just go to a real dictionary site since they will get their answer faster rather than expending effort learning Wiki-jibberish. Most programmers look at this jibberish and figure that they've accidently read data past the end of the string.

that jibberish is the global standard method of phonetic transcription. it is not intended that everyone already know it, but that anyone can look it up and learn the accurate pronunciation.the dictionaries that you cite use essentially similar systems, except theirs are proprietary ad-hoc nonsense which only cover the spectrum of the language the dictionary uses. nobody's born knowing SAMPA.

cream wobbly wrote:I love that someone made reference to "real world consequences", as if Wikipedia is the real world...

What world is Wikipedia in, then?

I'm reminded of a comment from a friend of mine, who came back from a meeting with activists who were planning a political demonstration, at which the activists kept referring to each other as "kids." The activists were mostly in their mid-twenties, not children, and older than people he had known who had been killed or imprisoned for their political work in other countries. He said that these activists, by calling themselves "kids," were failing to take themselves, their actions, and their lives seriously, and that this was crippling them.

The Internet is new. That doesn't make it somehow not real. Science was once new, popular political assemblies were once new. Blood, sweat, and tears, as well as occasional laughter, have made them real.

Asleep or Wrong wrote:that jibberish is the global standard method of phonetic transcription. it is not intended that everyone already know it, but that anyone can look it up and learn the accurate pronunciation.the dictionaries that you cite use essentially similar systems, except theirs are proprietary ad-hoc nonsense which only cover the spectrum of the language the dictionary uses. nobody's born knowing SAMPA.

Erm, that "ad-hoc nonsense" tends to be superior to the IPA in that it's simpler and, at least in the case of Webster, relative and therefore accent-neutral. The IPA is a solution in want of a problem.

Frédéric Bastiat wrote:Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Let's focus on the real scandal here, please: Randall is trying to take credit for malamanteau, a word that I invented three years ago. My lawyers are drafting some strongly-worded letters as we speak!

BioTube wrote:Erm, that "ad-hoc nonsense" tends to be superior to the IPA in that it's simpler and, at least in the case of Webster, relative and therefore accent-neutral.

I agree with the simpler part. The people at Wikipedia seem to disagree with the "accent neutral" part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respelling I don't know enough about languages and dialects to form my own opinion on the later.

The IPA is a solution in want of a problem.

IPA is language-neutral and (with extensions) can represent all human speech sounds, even those which do not occur in English. Thus, it is suitable for any language. Perhaps the use of IPA on Wikipedia for English words is over-complicating things, but more generally, IPA is certainly not pointless.

ludwig_van2 wrote:Let's focus on the real scandal here, please: Randall is trying to take credit for malamanteau, a word that I invented three years ago. My lawyers are drafting some strongly-worded letters as we speak!

Tei wrote:I don't know if the concept is interesting or not, because the deletionism puritans censors have killed the page on wikipedia.

So sad Wikipedia is run by censors now

In my days, we called them “editors.”

C'mon Mr. Burke, we all know the difference between censors and editors, and wikipedia is plagued by both.

Censors come from the government (or similar institutions, most notably the Church) and meddle with works published by other people, while editors meddle with work published by themselves. I don't quite see why the latter would be a plague.

Tei wrote:I don't know if the concept is interesting or not, because the deletionism puritans censors have killed the page on wikipedia.

So sad Wikipedia is run by censors now

In my days, we called them “editors.”

C'mon Mr. Burke, we all know the difference between censors and editors, and wikipedia is plagued by both.

Censors come from the government (or similar institutions, most notably the Church) and meddle with works published by other people, while editors meddle with work published by themselves. I don't quite see why the latter would be a plague.

it was a "everyone can edit" proyect; if you have designated editors, then it misses the purpose. Also, in wikipedia editors meddle with work published by others; but there is the point, I agree that there must be regulation (the sad, sad case of Brock Lesnar entry comes to my memory), but I disagree with the method, and publicly acknowledge that I don't know how to improve this.Totally agree with your church statement, come to South america and you will see how frightening is the power of the church here, christian and others too.

Don't protest against my methods, if you want to continue living of my results

You're lumping author and editor together. Authors don't publish (neither do editors). The Wikimedia Foundation does. It's their right to decide what will be published; to enforce that right they put people in charge of the editing process (i.e. the admins).

DragonHawk wrote:I agree with the simpler part. The people at Wikipedia seem to disagree with the "accent neutral" part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respelling I don't know enough about languages and dialects to form my own opinion on the later.

The link you posted (as of this moment, at least) actually says the opposite: /föhn/ is an accurate IPA transcription of "fern", but only for certain non-rhotic accents; in Webster's, the pronunciation guide gives "fern" as an example of how to pronounce /'ər/: that is, however you pronounce "fern" is how you pronounce /'ər/ wherever it appears. Likewise, "cat" and "hat" rhyme in every accent, but the vowel can be (IPA) /a/, /æ/, or /ɛ/ (possible /e/ or even /ɪ/). Since it's better for speakers to pronounce all their words in the same accent, you want an accent-neutral pronunciation guide. IPA does NOT provide that.

tetsujin wrote:I once wrote up an article in Uncyclopedia about "Port Manteau", a town in Louisiana with a suspicious similarity to New Orleans, a few accidents of history that kept it forever out of the center of attention, and its one widely recognized contribution to the rest of the world (I think you can guess where that bit is going...)

It got deleted because, apparently, it wasn't funny. Maybe just sour grapes here but I thought it was good.

So on the France version of Wikipedia (or French-Canadian version if there is such a thing) does it say 'maiden name' instead? Why toss in such an uncommon foreign word on a North American page? The claim it's an "English-adopted' term, but I beg to differ....

Mr. Burke wrote:You're lumping author and editor together. Authors don't publish (neither do editors). The Wikimedia Foundation does. It's their right to decide what will be published; to enforce that right they put people in charge of the editing process (i.e. the admins).

On the English Wikipedia, at least, admins are more like traffic cops or referees than editors (at least, as far as admin duties go). Conduct disputes, vandalism, privileged operations, that sort of thing. Admins are the ones that have to actually click "delete, but they nominally don't make the decision to keep or delete; that's done by discussion open to everyone. (Speedy deletion is a semi-exception to this, but it's nominally only for clear-cut cases of obvious garbage.)

*Anyway*, what I'm really leading up to is that Wikipedians (people who contribute content to Wikipedia) are all both authors and editors. It's a collaborative writing/editing process. Anyone can write anything, and anyone else can modify it. In theory, over time, consensus leads to a reasonable quality. It actually works better than I would have expected.

I think strife arises because the Wikipedia community has decided certain standards should apply. People see "anyone can edit" and think it's open season for anything and everything. Sorry, no. "Anyone can edit" does not mean "everyone gets what they want".

I think that anyone who takes their time to learn IPA ultimately benefits from it as it is very helpful when explaining how to pronounce words in other languages properly - although I suppose knowing linguistics in general helps.

The sad thing about Wikipedia is that sometimes I look up a term of art, have no idea what they're talking about, then find a much clearer definition, of the same length, in some textbook, then look back at Wikipedia and realize they're saying the exact same thing.

Very, very rarely, the Wikipedia definition is broader in scope, but still.

The citation from the 1490's about malamanteau struck me as odd.The term malapropism came about from the play The Rivals from 1765, which I learned in my Grade 10 English class.Wikipedia agress and confirms the earliest use of malapropism was in 1630.

Legend holds that Buckminster Fuller coined the term 'debunk' and started dropping it in at parties, then tracked how long it took to make into the lexicon... It's a shame he didn't have access to wikipedia. No telling what our language might look like now